It wasn't as good as the book

Photobucket.comJeff Bridges stars in the 2004 film "The Door in the Floor," based on the first half of the John Irving novel "A Widow For One Year."

We read a film review today; we won't say of what or by whom because that's not important to the point we're making here. The critic pretty much trashed a movie that we think is kind of wonderful, but that's fine. Who's to say we have a monopoly on wisdom? (Or anyone else, for that matter?) But the review's central thesis we found dramatically wrong-headed.

The writer basically argued that the movie isn't as good as the book --- in this case a novella --- on which it's based. Well, who the heck cares? It's virtually unheard of for a film to expand on an original work when that original work is a book. There are countless places a book can go that a film, constrained in most cases to a two-hour time frame, simply cannot. Scenes get cut, characters are lost, and so on.

Add to that the fact that the characters and moments you imagined and created in your head reading the book must by necessity be invented by others for a movie, and that what's created will often not mesh with what was already in your head.

If audience members, however, cannot see that film is a different art form --- and a wonderful, visual art form --- from the printed word, or if they cherish their memory of the book so much that they don't want to see it altered, then they should stay away from the film. But we would expect more from a critic.

Although we've no doubt fallen victim to it before, we like to believe that in reviewing a film we routinely put aside any comparison to the book on which it may be based. In most cases we haven't read the book, often we didn't even know there was one until later, so that's not a problem. But a movie should be judged for the movie that it is, not any earlier permutations it may have had.

Irving is our favorite living American novelist, we enjoy everything he's written, but found "Widow" a little --- well, it could've been tighter, which is something the movie, in adapting only half of the book, does quite nicely. The film starred Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger and is quite fine, but has since disappeared off the face of the earth, as movies will often do.

We had the chance to interview Irving on the occasion of the movie's release, and while we don't get starstruck, we did meeting him. Upon ending our interview we shook his hand, and then shook his hand again.

Ken Tirado has some very cogent comments at the bottom of our last blog entry, two of which we want to follow up on. Yes, the film "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" can feel rather jokey, but that was not the tone of William Goldman's original script, which was considerably darker (legends living past their time, etc.). Some of that darkness even made it onto film, but director George Roy Hill cut those scenes. It's reasonable to assume Darryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox had something to do with that.

We would argue that Robert Redford was indeed an unknown when the "Butch" script arrived on his doorstep around 1967 or so. He was a movie star after this film came out, he wasn't before. Hill had to ask Paul Newman (who, various news outlets continue to report, is now near death), who had more leverage, to fight to get Redford in the picture. Yes, Redford had already starred in "Barefoot in the Park," but that movie, well-regarded as it is today, didn't exactly take the country by storm. We certainly weren't paying much attention at the time (being all of 4 years old).